Yana van der Meulen Rodgers on Economics Books for Young Children

It’s great that you’ve chosen picture books because, judging from the recent crisis, I think we all need a bit of help with basic economic concepts.

That’s true and that’s part of the idea behind this project I’m involved with – to teach children while they’re young about economic concepts and to get them to be familiar at an early age with the economic world around them. Also, not to be scared of economics – many of us, as adults, don’t like that word. But, if kids grow up very familiar with some of these economics ideas in a comfortable context, what better thing is there?

What age range are these books for? 

Kindergarten to fourth grade, ages approximately five to ten. After that, kids start to read textbooks and chapter books; they don’t need pictures so much any more. 

You have a PhD in economics from Harvard – you could have done anything. What inspired you to do this? 

I’m an international economist and I do research about women in the labour market. But, having three young children myself, I’m always reading to children. About ten years ago, I came across a bibliography at the public library of children’s books with economics content. And I thought, what a cool concept! So I ended up taking out all these books and getting to know the woman who put the list together, who was a reading specialist. We ended up doing some research articles together about teaching economics to children. 

So the first book you’ve chosen is Cloud Tea Monkeys, by Mal Peet and Elspeth Graham. Tell me why it’s on your list. 

My own specialty is women globally and I do a lot of work on women in poor countries. This book focuses on a woman who is very poor. She is in a South Asian country and she picks tealeaves for a living. Her daughter is either too young to go to school or they cannot afford to send her to school, so the daughter often comes along to the plantation. But one day the mother gets very sick and she can no longer pick tea. The daughter is worried that there is no money to pay for the doctor, she really despairs, and ultimately ends up dragging this enormous tea basket to the plantation to try and do the work herself. The overseer is really an angry, mean boss, and he just laughs at her. And then the fantasy kicks in. The young girl goes and cries in the woods next to the tea plantation and some monkeys end up filling the tea basket, with the best tea in the world, Cloud Tea. The emperor of this country loves the tea and after that, every year, the mother and her daughter get a bag of coins from the emperor for this magical tea. It’s a lovely story. It shows some of the very real poverty that we see in developing countries, but there’s a touch of magic in it, that it’s all going to be OK. So this book really touched my heart. I’ve read it to a number of classes and by the end the children are clapping – they love the story.

The tea plantation is in a beautiful place in the mountains – the illustrations are really nice. 

They are beautiful illustrations. That’s the nice thing with these picture books. I’m often looking at the text, the economics in the narrative, but the pictures really help to make or break a book.

If I were reading this book to my kids, what would I be teaching them about, income inequality? 

Yes. There are several lessons, and income inequality is definitely one of them. But also, here in the US, often kids don’t like school. A lesson is to teach our kids how fortunate they are to be in school, because in some countries children are so poor they cannot go to school – the family cannot afford the fees, or the children actually have to work to support the family.

Your next book is Those Shoes, about a little boy who can’t afford the trendy shoes all his classmates have. 

In this book the main concept is want versus need, and in the American school system, in many state standards, that’s one of the first economic concepts that young children, five-year-olds, are mandated to have to learn. Teachers have to teach some simple economic concepts, beginning with wants and needs. So this book is just right on. The boy really wants these shoes that everyone else has, but he is very poor. He’s being raised by his grandmother and she knows he needs new boots, he does not need these fancy sneakers. But he wants them so badly! And they visit different shops and finally he sees those shoes at a thrift store, but they’re too small. He doesn’t care, he still asks his grandmother to buy them, which she does. But they hurt his feet whenever he wears them and they cause blisters, so ultimately he stops wearing them. By the end of the story he is giving the shoes away to another boy in the class who is also from a poor background. It’s a hard decision for him to give the shoes away, but he does. It’s such a nice story.

Very understandable why the boy wants what everyone else in the class has, and also so easy, as a parent, if you’re not poor, to always say yes. 

It is. It’s hard to teach budget constraints when perhaps our families are not as constrained as some others. It’s very easy to give in when our children say, ‘But everyone else has one.’ We don’t want our children to stick out like a sore thumb; we want to help them fit in.

And yet there’s definitely an anti-materialistic streak in your book choices… Do you think that income inequality is something we really need to set out and teach at an early age, that otherwise it might pass children by? 

Yes, and that’s why a lot of these books in my top five have this international and poverty focus: that’s my own leaning. I think it’s crucial for our children be aware of how fortunate they are, and to start thinking about how they can give back. It’s important for them to see the world with more open eyes and be less materialistic – rather than getting caught up in ‘I’ve got to have this’, ‘I really want that’.

Next is Violet The Pilot. How excellent to include this because, as parents, we are constantly faced with the problem of gender stereotyping. So Violet is a mechanical genius who could repair almost any appliance by age two. 

Exactly. The economics here is a little more sophisticated. The general themes are women in science, which economists write about as well, and women breaking into non-traditional occupations. But there’s another concept that is embedded in some of these content standards and that’s innovation and invention: how innovation helps to improve our standard of living.

When I interviewed British economist Diane Coyle, she also emphasised the importance of innovation and chose a book on it.  She pointed out that Jacob Rothschild, the richest man in the world, died in 1836 of a tooth infection that these days would have been cured with a $10 antibiotic. But Violet the Pilot is also just a very nice book, isn’t it? 

Yes, the illustrations are just incredible – the detail and the warmth and the humour embedded in them. So this book is about a young girl who is an inventor and an innovator, who designs these contraptions, and that’s the economics part of the book, even though it’s not really that clear in the story. Violet invents different airplanes and helicopters, and she is on her way to an air show where she wants to show off her inventions when she notices that there is a boy-scout troop stranded in the river. So she misses the air show, and instead she rescues this troop. She comes home all disheartened because she missed her air show, but at the end of the book she is celebrated because she is a hero who rescued these people who needed help.